text: Quite a number of successful explanations can be, and were, made from these hypotheses alone. We can explain the cooling of a cup of tea in room temperature: caloric is self-repelling, and thus slowly flows from regions dense in caloric (the hot water) to regions less dense in caloric (the cooler air in the room).
  We can explain the expansion of air under heat: caloric is absorbed into the air, which increases its volume. If we say a little more about what happens to caloric during this absorption phenomenon, we can explain the radiation of heat, the state changes of matter under various temperatures, and deduce nearly all of the gas laws.
  Sadi Carnot, who reasoned purely on the basis of the caloric theory, developed his principle of the Carnot cycle, which still forms the basis of heat engine theory. Carnot's analysis of energy flow in steam engines (1824) marks the beginning of ideas which led thirty years later to the recognition of the second law of thermodynamics.
  Caloric was believed to be capable of entering chemical reactions as a substituent inciting corresponding changes in the matter states of other substances. Lavoisier explained that the caloric quantity of a substance, and by extent the fluid elasticity of caloric, directly determined the state of the substance. Thus, changes in state were a central aspect of a chemical process and essential for a reaction where the substituents undergo changes in temperature. Changes of state had gone virtually ignored by previous chemists making the caloric theory the inception point for this class of phenomena as a subject of interest under scientific inquiry.
  However, one of the greatest apparent confirmations of the caloric theory was Pierre-Simon Laplace's theoretical correction of Sir Isaac Newton’s calculation of the speed of sound. Newton had assumed an isothermal process, while Laplace, a calorist, treated it as adiabatic. This addition not only substantially corrected the theoretical prediction of the speed of sound, but also continued to make even more accurate predictions for almost a century afterward, even as measurements became more precise.